Abstract
This paper aims to investigate whether language use can account for the differences in code-switching within the article-noun phrase in children exposed to English and German, French and Russian, and English and Polish. It investigates two aspects of language use: equivalence and segmentation. Four children’s speech is derived from corpora of naturalistic interactions recorded between the ages of two and three and used as a source of the children’s article-noun phrases. We demonstrate that children’s CS cannot be fully explained by structural equivalence in each two languages: there is CS in French-Russian although French does, and Russian does not, use articles. We also demonstrate that language pairs which use higher numbers of articles types, and therefore have more segmented article-noun phrases, are also more open to switching. Lastly, we show that longitudinal use of monolingual articles-noun phrases corresponds with the trends in the use of bilingual article-noun phrases. The German-English child only starts to mix English articles once they become more established in monolingual combinations while the French-Russian child ceases to mix French proto-articles with Russian nouns once target articles enter frequent use. These findings are discussed in the context of other studies which report code-switching across different language pairs.
Highlights
In our study we explore structural equivalence, which is seen as two languages expressing comparable concepts by means of phrases that use the same number of words, ordered in the same sequence
Articles are never used autonomously, so we examine their productivity as linked to their type-token ratios (TTRs): we speculate that article-noun phrases (ANPs) in languages with higher numbers of article types become segmented, and open to CS sooner than ANPs in languages with lower numbers of article types
Tessa was recorded when addressed in her weaker language, that which typically encourages the most CS, and yet no interaction was recorded within her ANPs. This tells us that CS cannot be down to the context of interaction, but it must have something to do with the two languages spoken by the girls, and we argue that the segmentation of equivalent constructions in both languages offers an important lens for studying the interaction between their developing structures
Summary
Children are still reported to switch even when their caregivers do not use bilingual utterances (Gaskins et al 2019a; Mishina-Mori 2011), which suggests that CS is developmental. Some of it can be explained by more frequent use of the dominant language, which has implications for easier access to its words and constructions (Quick et al 2019); some by the linguistic material being primed in the context of interaction (Quick et al 2018a)
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